Did you know today’s National Hangover Awareness Day? I did as of 90 seconds ago! Which is when I saw a tweet about the more-a-promotional-stunt-than-actual-commemorative-day Day. Although it makes sense, when you read the press release think about it: The Monday after the Super Bowl, in fact, clocks more calls in sick to work than any other day of the year.

If there were an official Five O’Clock Press Release in response to the NHAD press release, nobody would read it it would read:

This is a post about friendship, a subject that tends to worm its way into your cranium quite a bit when a) it’s January and b) you’re spending your first of several years abroad, hundreds of miles from the people you like best and also from a TV that carries American college basketball.

Our friends Michelle and Dan, back in New York, are pretty awesomesauce peeps. I knew Michelle vaguely but fondly from the first time I lived in the city, before moving to the Midwest for several years. From the very minute I moved back to Gotham, thanks to forces I’ll never quite understand but will forever appreciate, the friendship was just there, fully realized and present. We both met our respective fiances within a year, doubling the number of very cool people we got to hang out with whenever we hung out together.

Of course, Michelle and Dan are big cocktail fans. (Srsly, why else would Sean and I ever hang out with anyone?) They’re not quite as fanatical as we are, I’d say, because in their hearts they save some room for beer, and also their whiskey allegiance veers towards the waters of northern Europe (IRL, UK, etc.) rather than the Nation of Kentucky. But a couple summers ago when Sean and I wanted to drive upstate to the Tuthilltown Distillery‘s Facebook Fan Appreciation Day (yes, that was a real thing — shut up, Sean won a bourbon barrel!), we knew exactly who we wanted to come along with us.

A regular of mine at The Royale (one of the ones I had a crush on) came in one night many years ago and ordered “a Manhattan, put it up on skates.” I shot him one of my perplexed Charlie Brown faces; he unfurled a devilish Cheshire grin (catnip to a female bartender who was fed up with her boyfriend at that point). He’d just heard this phrase, probably earlier that night during his own shift, and couldn’t wait to test it out on me. My demurely flirtatious reply: “What the fuck does ‘put it up on skates’ mean?”

It meant, shake the shit out of a Manhattan so hard that when you strain it, perfect, adorable little ice floes, teensy shards small enough to scoot through the coils of your Hawthorne strainer, dot the surface of your cocktail. To this day I know of nobody else who’s ever heard of or used this expression, but it’s always stuck with me as quite a cool thing to say… although yes, nowadays we know that all-alcohol cocktails like the Manhattan ought to be stirred, not shaken, lest you “bruise” their precious molecules. (See: “Don’t ever shake that drink, or you’ll kill it.”) Someday I’ll side-by-side taste-test that theory, but for now what can I say except that it was the 00’s; we were the young and the reckless, and I was really hoping to kiss this guy soon.

Any good mixologist will tell you: The thing that makes a great cocktail stand apart from a good one is proportion. Yes, having quality product always helps, sometimes a lot. However, a strong case can be made that the true skill of a bartender/cocktail creator is in getting the ratio just right, turning average booze into a mouthwatering beverage. When Rose and I sit down to craft a new cocktail or to recreate something we had out at one of our favorite bars, we spend most of our time fussing over how much or this or that should be in the drink. It can often take us three, four or five tries to get it right. It’s hard work, really, but someone has to do it. And always remember, dear reader, that we do it for you… all for you!

All that being said, I’ve had a thing for equal proportions lately. Perhaps due to my summertime obsession with the Negroni*. When I came across this recipe for The Lamb'[s Club while thumbing through Mark Holcomb’s cocktail book library, I figured I’d give it a try.

There’s a great future in aperitifs and digestifs. I don’t just mean that in a Benjamin-Braddock-searching-for-meaning-in-the-60s-oh-I-get-it-she’s-referencing-The Graduate kind of way. Italian liqueurs are mega-trendy big right now and I say good on it, because they’re relatively cheap (~$20 a bottle, less for vermouths), a little goes a long way, they’re becoming easily available, they have the best ad posters, they were born to make nice in endless kinds of cocktail recipes, and once you start you’ll want to collect them and play with them and come up with neat at-home displays for them like you used to do with your Smurfs.

Do more classic cocktails, is my #1 resolution for the blog this year. As much as I love, and have no plans to cease, inventing original recipes, perhaps I should ease up on bedeviling you all with my illimitabletippleperspicacity (resolution #2: consult thesaurus more) for the sake of some insightful, happy hour convo-worthy history lessons on drinks that have stood the test of time, or haven’t but deserve as much. Plus, discuss how to make said vintage drinks at their finest, a la The World’s Greatest Cosmopolitan. (Resolution Trois: I am the greatest!)

What Santa didn’t bring me for Christmas this last year, I got for myself at The Wine Library back in the States, including two key ingredients for The Apropos: 1) the Italian aperitif Aperol, Campari’s genteel cousin: lighter in color and alcohol content, but produced by the same parent company (nowadays, not originally); 2) yellow Chartreuse – likewise, not as strong as the better-known green Chartreuse — which was actually on the wish list of a bartending friend back in Canadia. (By the way, remind me never to tell you about the time the PhoBlograpHusband and I managed to transport a double-digit number of booze bottles across the border by being completely honest with the customs guard. I don’t know who reads this blog.)

This cocktail comes via SeriousEats.com, courtesy of Gramercy Tavern in New York. While I needed to make a few detours around the restaurant’s recipe in order to tailor it to my diminishing stock, it also calls for certain ingredients I’ve got too much of lurking around my post-Thanksgiving fridge, so yay! (In case you haven’t noticed, this week on the blog is unofficially Make Use of T’giving Leftovers Week.)

What I was happy to have reason to use was my fresh thyme. Someday, I swear, I’m going to construct the world’s most impressive year-round herb garden (complete with shoe-organizer mini-plots!), but until then, I find myself all too often buying fresh herbs in presized packages, using a few sprigs for one recipe, then watching the rest wilt in the crisper. Not this time, Mother Nature! Half of my leftover thyme went into an infusion (reveal date TBD); the rest made the thyme syrup for the Fall Classic.

The Bittman is a source of contention around here. Me, I don’t think much about The Bitt one way or the other. I never read The Bitt’s Minimalist column with regularity and have never understood the cult of his personality. He’s just a goofy white guy who mostly cooks off-book, right? Who can’t do that? Buy whatever’s wholesome and on sale, go home and Google “easy [something you just bought] recipe,” pick the one you can fudge the best and make. (At least, that’s what I do.)

(Having said that, my new love is Gojee.com, which lets you search blogged-about recipes by ingredients you have/crave/dislike. And I’m not just saying that because this blog is included in the new Gojee Drinks database!)

Anyway, Sean hates The Bitt. What Sean has to say about The Bitt is, “He’s just annoying and he seems like a hack. I don’t understand why anybody cares what he has to say. I do not trust his authority. I feel like anyone could be Mark Bittman, he just happens to be the one, probably because he knows somebody or various other social injustices.”

Yet I couldn’t look away when a recent Bittman headline in the Times touted “A Radical Rethinking of Thanksgiving Leftovers.” Just how “radical” were we talking here? Well, The Bitt had me at “pan-fried stuffing cakes,” and so I read until the end, where I was rewarded with the notion of a Cranberry Negroni. Or really, tortured by reading in print that The Bitt had come up with a way to sneak a cocktail into his list of 20 radicalizations, and WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT, DAMMIT?! DAMN THE BITT!! (I’m not the only one who feels this way, either.)

My gosh, today kinda sucks, no? Not to rain (or snow, as it is up here in the Great White North) on anyone’s Thanksgiving Eve Parade, but this is always a busy and stressful day. What with the last-minute cleaning and shopping and cooking and fretting that your mother-in-law is going to get stuck in a snowbank somewhere north of Albany on her drive up to see you. And, even if you’re the self-employed, work-at-home type like me, the assignments you’re trying to get out the virtual door before getting yourself out your actual one, where walkway clearing awaits so Mom doesn’t kill herself on her way from her car to your apartment. Meanwhile, your dog won’t let you type at full speed because she likes her paw held while snuggling on the couch next to you, which results in typos like this one that just happened: “ci 980hkmn.”

Phew, *breathe*! My point is, I’ve got one more to-do to put on your list today, and it is worthwhile and it is this: Buy Underberg at your neighborhood’s finer liquor store. (Or Dean & Deluca.)